Natterbox AVS (Advanced Voice Services), launched in 2017 as a progression from Natterbox Classic Edition and is an outstanding telephony platform and call center solution for Salesforce. With lots of telephony applications on the AppExchange, Natterbox has always been a big contender in this space and their new product release doesn’t deviate from that.

There are a few things that make AVS stand out from other CTI (Call Telephony Interchange) products, but one of the biggest selling points is that the system has been designed using components from the Salesforce platform and incorporates SF focused ideology.

This means that the CTI app can interact with your Salesforce data in all sorts of clever ways, and is optimised behind the scenes (i.e. having lower Salesforce API callouts than other CTI applications).

Natterbox also has complete ownership of its PBX (Private Branch Exchange) so it’s more than just a cloud software vendor, but also a global telephony company with 8 data centers around the world to ensure good performance.

Features

As with any CTI plugin, Natterbox allows your users to have access to a digital phone for inbound and outbound calling while working within Salesforce or as a separate desktop application. Keep in mind the user doesn’t need to consume a Salesforce license to utilize this tool and you can even configure the tool to work with people that don’t even have access to a computer.

There’s over a whopping 120 countries that you’re able to allocate to specific users or teams, and it’s easy to switch between multiple phone lines on the fly using the interface provided.

As a team leader, you’re also able to monitor your team’s calls, showing the status of agents, the call queue, and have a snapshot of various phone features that can all be personalized.

With each call that’s logged, you also have the option to enable voice recording options and tailor these preferences as required for auditing purposes or as needed.

While the audio files themselves aren’t hosted in Salesforce (as to not dramatically consume store capacity in your org), these are easily accessed from the call log record or directly from the activity and when opened will even include a visualization of the audio frequency levels.

One of the benefits of this application being so intertwined within Salesforce is that it also comes with over 120 of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards that are native to Salesforce (and also Lighting-Ready!)

This is useful to understand some of the analytical options right from the get go, but also provides decent reporting templates for users to replicate, or to even add as an additional component to any existing dashboards. It also allows you to produce reports and dashboards that combine real customer data and telephony data easily as the data is all inside Salesforce objects.

While the call center features are powerful and already great eye candy. what really makes Natterbox stand out from it’s competitors is it’s automation power that’s configurable by System Administrators all within Salesforce and uses a Process Builder look-and-feel.

As you can see by the diagram above, you can map out your call center routing logic and events as they unfold so that it aligns with business processes and can easily be followed by using a diagrammatic approach.

Again, because it’s built using Salesforce components, it can do some more powerful things than your typical CTI tool couldn’t, such as manipulate data in various sources and utilize data in the logic of the flow components.

One example that best demonstrates this is with the Text-to-Speech capabilities of the app. The text to speech function allows a written line of text to be read aloud from one of the many different audio personas at a specific time, and it can even be smart enough to pull in a value on the related record (if found), such as the customer’s name!

There’s also great components specifically tied to call routing and queuing functionality, which have simple to complex complex solution options based on the specific scenarios that you may have for these different events.

Finally, the cherry on the top, is the ability to send SMS notifications, post to chatter, or send an email as an event in the flow diagram. This exciting functionality speaks for itself and opens up some awesome opportunities for businesses in the automation space!

Impact

Call telephony systems are always an amazing addition to a Salesforce org and well worth the investment having that centralized one-customer view.

Specific to Natterbox, as already touched on, it is a native tool and with optimized performance from a back-end perspective. What this means though is it gives powerful automation options for updating data, or utilizing this data within call center actions – so you can build a CTI system that does most of the agent work for you!

Not only are you able to automate customer journeys and self-service options, but also record those specific self-serve success metrics to gaining insight into your customer base. If you know your service have lots of phone calls with customers ringing up, just to access information that’s housed in Salesforce, this is a wonderful use case. The only note would be to consider the authentication process needed and what specific data requires a validated customer.

The global reach that this tool has is also great if you have agents that might do a frequent amount travel. The tool enables them to not be impaired to make or answer calls, and will automatically apply the best connection in the area regardless of the assigned phone number.

Because this app can do so much, this comes at a trade-off of requiring some knowledge to be able to make sure it is setup correctly and is a scalable solution built using industry best practices. The good news is that the team at Natterbox are fully dedicated to supporting with this, but I’d advise making sure as a business you’ve got a good understanding on how you want your call center to work.

Setup

To get Natterbox working and specific to your business needs, it’s recommended to get in touch with their installation team and there are proficient Salesforce CTI experts on hand for support. Natterbox is continuously working with leading Salesforce implementation partner companies, so this could also be another option to ensure a smooth implementation.

If you were wanting to try out the tool for yourself and you’re intermediate-advanced Salesforce guru, you’ll be more than able to try out the product for yourself. The initial setup is straightforward, only requiring the installation of the package from the AppExchange listing and entering in a valid license number to the admin screen.

Note: You’re able to install AVS by itself, but if you want the full suite of apps, will need to install both AppExchange listings into your org (AVS and CTI).

The admin screen is accessed via a tab inside Salesforce too, which will take you to all the options for configuring the tool. You’re able to monitor the products that your company has subscribed for, how many users consumed Natterbox licenses, and get any key administrative information when navigating to this view.

You have the option to create numbers for separate locations smoothly and select whether the number is specific to an individual or to everyone in the company.

Once you have the number setup, you’ll be able to then configure specific individuals, which don’t necessarily have to have Salesforce access. When creating a Natterbox user, you can choose if they are a Salesforce user, or if they’re external to Salesforce (in which case they can use the separate desktop web-phone or their personal phone), and grant this user the right permissions.

Finally, the nuts-and-bolts of the admin areas, you’ll be able to customize the call process for inbound and outbound calls using the routing policy builder. This isn’t something that does require a decent level of experience to setup, but the package does have the simple versions of these already setup as a template and it’s intuitive to use after experimenting.

As mentioned in the features section, there’s a powerful amount of functions that the tool can do, but I highly recommend analyzing your internal processes first before implementing any call center flows.

If you are SF Salesforce savvy, consider incorporating workflows/process builders in conjunction with this tool, dependent on your business needs. If you’re blessed with access to Salesforce developers, you may also wish to expand on the components if there’s something the package doesn’t do, so that option is there too.

Pricing

For more information on pricing, contact the Natterbox team about the AVS product and its options.

The tool is also cheaper for non-for-profit companies, so reach out to the team for more information.

Conclusion

The Swiss-army knife call centre Salesforce application!

Natterbox AVS is far more than a typical CTI addition to Salesforce and is quite literally a complete CTI platform for building out that dream call center within Salesforce. While the back-end customization might require a bit of hand holding, this is definitely the app worth looking in to if you want to do something a bit fancy in this area.

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